Art is a powerful medium for getting messages across, and "good art" is often defined as art that successfully expresses a message to its audience. Yet another thing that blurs the line between what is and isn't artwork is this idea of propaganda. In propaganda, an ideology or belief is sown into a piece of artwork very intentionally for the purpose of convincing the audience of a reality, typically one that a government or political organization believes in, but is it even possible to dissociate art and propaganda?

Two articles discuss to very different iterations of propaganda that propose two different messages. The first describes a strategy by ISIS to take popular art pieces, such as those Brian McCarty, and change them to support ISIS' message. This style of propaganda

serves to not only enrage the opponents of the ideology being supported, but simultaneously unite people under the same flag in order to combat the Western culture that they are stealing from. The goal here is unity against something external, which contrasts the propaganda discussed in the second article, which describes socialist realism. Socialist realism was derived from an artistic movement in the Soviet Union to portray

the plight of the common man, and their hard work. The work eventually,however, broke away from its original intent and became a method of propaganda for the Soviet Government to glorify the communist system by showing images of regular people enjoying their lives, with plentiful food and good clothes. It took the original idea of showing the reality of living in the middle and lower classes, and perverted them into the perpetuation of a national illusion of the greatness of the Soviet government.

The question still remains of, what is art and what is propaganda? The work by ISIS seems a lot less like artwork, but does still speak to a larger theme in art of recreating artwork with more "modern" themes. Additionally, the "propaganda" of inspiring a sense of nationalism can be seen rampant during the Revolutions of both America and France. Basically, there is no real ability to truly separate art and propaganda unless you decide that one particular perspective is more "right than another, which is in some cases very easy while very difficult to establish in others. ​